Sex, Drugs, Blogging and Bloody Hard Work
Last weekend's New York Times Magazine carried a fine profile by Clive Thompson of the musician Jonathan Coulton. Titled " Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog", it provided a valuable insight on the changing face of the music business. It also illuminated the sobering reality of new vs. old networks and new vs. old media. Money quotes:
"His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd. [Snip] ...Coulton's single biggest spike in traffic to his Web site took place last December, when he appeared on NPR's 'Weekend Edition Sunday,' a fact that, he notes, proves how powerful old-fashioned media still are. (And 'Weekend Edition' is orders of magnitude smaller than major entertainment shows like MTV's 'Total Request Live,' which can make a new artist in an afternoon.) Perhaps there's no way to use the Internet to vault from the B-list to the A-list and the only bands that sell millions of copies will always do it via a well-financed major-label promotion campaign."
Hats off to Jonathan Coulton who has built his community with a lot of really hard work. And this is the central message of Clive Thompson's article: when it comes to using blogs, MySpace and YouTube for carving out an identity and an existence, it is bloody hard work. The rules may be changing, but the game is still stacked in favour of the old boys and their networks.
